Month: July 2008

by Chris Bodenner
In response to my post on bribes, a reader writes:

Commanders I knew in Anbar province during my time there (2005-2006) called money a "combat multiplier."  It was a tactic.  … The Anbar tribes have always been on the dole.  I was told by the Sheikhs and Imams in Fallujah that Saddam Hussein had been paying them off for years, to keep them quiet and keep violence down.  He had the same problems with Anbar that we’ve had.

In fact, just the fact that we call it "bribes" betrays our Western, post-enlightenment, rule-of-law, frame of reference.  Arab tribal leaders have always shared their bounty with their followers, it is seen as a responsibility of leadership.  It is just a different cultural perspective.  And there is no doubt that Maliki must realize that he will have to pick up the slack in handouts (payoffs, whatever you call them) when we leave.  If he doesn’t do so, you can bet it is a deliberate move to antagonize the Sunni chiefs.

By Jessie Roberts

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross talks to analysts who think high prices bode well for stability in Iraq.

By Patrick Appel
Holland Cotter on the limits of weirdness in art:

…weird is too easy, too obvious, too thin. Like Surrealism, which is weirdness psychologized and academicized, it delivers a quick thrill but ends up being a snore…artists, caught up in a New York market that prospers from a million little weirdnesses, should take a head-clearing plunge back into work and see if there aren’t some other ways to go. Weird can be cool; it can be powerful. (The paintings of John Currin and Peter Saul are good examples.) But as an end-in-itself exercise…it’s a waste of time.

By Daniel Larison

At The American Scene, my colleague Peter Suderman has some interesting remarks on Obama’s cosmopolitanism that James Poulos and I critiqued last week.  Peter doesn’t think the phrase "citizen of the world" has much importance one way or the other, and characterized Obama’s use of it as an expression of this "trendy sentiment":

a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism that suggests that, while one might identify as an American, that shouldn’t be the outer limit of one’s identity group.

That raises a different question apart from whether the phrase is objectionable, and this is whether holding to "a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism" can be electorally successful in a presidential race when pitted against an opponent who seems intent on deploying nationalist-Americanist rhetoric, even if this rhetoric is designed to compensate for his otherwise abysmal, aimless campaign.  One of the many important observations John Lukacs has made about nationalism is its role in the presidential politics of the United States, and he has speculated that the reason why Republicans tend to prevail in these contests in the postwar era is that they represent the more nationalist of the two major parties.  Post-1968, this was usually defined in terms of national security policies, and we saw a resurgence of this again after 9/11, and this also relied heavily on the use of nationalist language and imagery apart from any substantive policy disagreements.  While both parties are split between what Brooks has called "populist nationalists" and "progressive globalists," the Republicans remain, at least when it comes to their supporters, the relatively more populist-nationalist party. 

Not surprisingly, it is on trade policy where this is least true (ask Duncan Hunter) and where there is a much larger constituency for a populist-nationalist candidate, which is what has made Obama’s support for most free trade agreements (except when campaigning in Ohio) an intriguing case of how Obama has accommodated himself quite readily to global trade neoliberalism over the objections and complaints of many progressives.  Regarding Obama and trade, Peter adds:

Seems to me it’s pretty tough to tout a citizen-of-the-world ethos while fighting to make it more difficult to interact with our neighbors in the global economy.

Yet this is why it seems to me that the phrase and the general themes of the Berlin speech, in which every kind of wall comes crashing down, are unusually ill-suited for an American public anxious about the effects of globalization, because Obama clearly is endorsing economic globalization and to the extent that he is making nods towards "free and fair trade" he is framing it in terms of lifting up the poorest regions of the world. 

As James Joyner has noted, McCain takes essentially the same positions and is even more ardent in his support of free trade agreements than Obama, so it might seem as if there is no danger to Obama here.  However, because of the reputations of the two parties, because of a perception that Democrats are more inclined to "a mildly left-leaning liberal anti-nationalism," there is greater risk for Obama in adopting positions that clash with populist impulses in his own party and in the general electorate.

Cross-posted at Eunomia 

By Patrick Appel
Frank Wilson shares:

I used to get angry a lot, but I realized something about anger one day that pretty much cured me of it in a snap. What I realized was that I got angry because (a) I was hurt and (b) couldn’t really do anything about it. The anger was an expression of impotence. The one thing I could do about what had hurt me was rant about it. No sooner had I realized that than I asked myself, “Why bother?” It didn’t do any good. And it felt awful. There is nothing pleasant about feeling angry. Of course, there’s nothing pleasant about feeling hurt, either, but if you face up to the discomfort, it fades after a while. Anger just prolongs it, like picking at a scab.

By Patrick Appel
"I used to say that Barack Obama raises taxes and John McCain cuts them, and I was convinced. I stand corrected."-Douglas Holtz-Eakin, chief domestic policy adviser for Sen. John McCain, Time.

Update: Time clarifies.

by Chris Bodenner
In response to my post on Steele’s op-ed, Coates wrote:

In Aspen, I watched Steele claim that white guilt was the reason we were losing the Iraq War. … Steele subscribes to the theory of Black Automatons in which black people don’t exist as actual people, but as robots whose whole lives are ordered around the machinations of white people.

This is why it’s laughable to see Steele attacking Jackson and Sharpton’s–they are branches of the same deterministic tree–there are no actual black people making individual determinations in the world of Steele or Jackson. … I actually agree with Steele on one thing—the end of the Civil Rights Industrial Complex is great thing for black people everywhere. But Steele is tied to that complex, and his ideas are just as bereft.

As indicated in my post, I agree with Coates that Steele completely jumps the shark when it comes to foreign policy.  And while I can’t speak to Steele’s performance in Aspen, I did cringe when I once saw him approvingly-sharing the stage with Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson (who once wrote that the suffering of African Americans during Katrina was a result of their "moral poverty.")  Steele can be acerbic at times, much like his peer Bill Cosby.  Their styles often taint the substance of their message.  I’d prefer to see the public messengers of personal responsibility be writers like John McWhorter and leaders like Obama, who are from a younger generation that absorbed the best of both sides of the race debate.  Thus, I agree with Coates that Steele is often stuck in a baby-boom paradigm.

But as far as his charge that "there are no actual black people making individual determinations in the world of Steele," I think that’s unfair.  When you become an academic like Steele who writes about theory all day, broad characterizations of people are inevitable.  But I’ve read a lot of his work, and the core theme I take from his writing is a plea for black individualism (which he argues is ignored by white liberals and even discouraged by black liberals).  In fact, my introduction to Steele was his Harper’s essay,  "The Age of White Guilt: And the Disappearance of the Black Individual."  He wrote:

[The black individual] lives in a society that needs his race for the good it wants to do more than it needs his individual self. His race makes him popular with white institutions and unifies him with blacks. But he is unsupported everywhere as an individual. Nothing in his society asks for or even allows his flowering as a full, free, and responsible person. As is always the case when "the good" becomes ascendant over freedom, and coercion itself becomes a good thing, the individual finds himself in a gulag.

The essay touches upon a tricky paradox of the civil rights movement: African Americans had to come together as one people to defeat institutional racism, but once it was defeated, they had to individuate and assimilate — which is different than conforming — in order to fully achieve Dr. King’s dream that his children "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." 

Unfortunately, Steele is constantly judged by the color of his skin.  But most of that judgment comes from Democrats, not Republicans — the usual suspects when it comes to racial attacks.  For example, notice the number of Matt’s readers who spit the slur "Uncle Tom" at Steele.  (That term should be as stigmatized as the word "nigger").  If Steele were white, his conservative political views would simply be dismissed as the grumpy rumblings of a "typical white Republican."  But since he is black, those same views are considered treasonous and self-hating, and an individual is made invisible.  It’s that kind of mindset that led me to write how "I wish his provocative views on race weren’t so immediately dismissed."  When it comes to Steele’s theories on race, there’s plenty to disagree with (as I do).  But writing him off is a real detriment to the race dialogue.

(That last paragraph doesn’t apply to Coates’ criticism, of course.  By the way, if you haven’t read it yet, he recently wrote a great Atlantic piece on the "audacity of Bill Cosby’s black conservatism.")

Century City, California, 11.19 am.

By Patrick Appel

Orlando Figes reviews Tim Tzouliadis’s The Forsaken, a book about depression-era Americans who moved to Russia in hope of a better life:

By the mid-1930s, there were 15,000 American citizens living in the Soviet Union, enough to form a baseball league, with Sunday games in Gorky Park. Most were soon deprived of their US passports by the Soviet authorities, which thereby claimed them as their own, but they were never really accepted as “Soviet” and many were arrested as potential “spies” during the Great Terror of 1937- 38. They vanished into the Gulag.